Sometimes the ‘Bots Turn Out To Be Humans

For various reasons, companies sometimes pretend to be using AI or machine learning (“pseudo-AI”) when they are actually using human employees. One reason is that they have promised potential investors more high tech than they can deliver. Sometimes, as we learned recently at The Guardian,it gets a bit sticky:

In the case of the San Jose-based company Edison Software, artificial intelligence engineers went through the personal email messages of hundreds of users – with their identities redacted – to improve a “smart replies” feature. The company did not mention that humans would view users’ emails in its privacy policy

We can certainly hope that identities were redacted…

In 2017, the business expense management app Expensify admitted that it had been using humans to transcribe at least some of the receipts it claimed to process using its “smartscan technology”. Scans of the receipts were being posted to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourced labour tool, where low-paid workers were reading and transcribing them. Olivia Solon, “The rise of ‘pseudo-AI’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work” at The Guardian

Maybe someone knows where you shop, what you buy, and where it was delivered… Not a big deal except that you didn’t know that anyone was looking.

See also: Screen Writers’ Jobs Are Not Threatened by AI. Unless the public starts preferring mishmash to creativity (Robert J.Marks)

and

AI That Can Read Minds? Deconstructing AI Hype The source for the claims seems to be a 2018 journal paper, “Real-time classification of auditory sentences using evoked cortical activity in humans.” The carefully described results are indeed significant but what the Daily Mail article didn’t tell you sheds a rather different light on the AI mind reader. (Robert J.Marks)

Mind Matters features original news and analysis at the intersection of artificial and natural intelligence. Through articles and podcasts, it explores issues, challenges, and controversies relating to human and artificial intelligence from a perspective that values the unique capabilities of human beings. Mind Matters is published by the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.